Tower, tarpaulin

Tower, a pillar of shopping carts stacked high around a clay column, looms over another piece, tarpaulin, a grimy blanket-sized swatch draped over a ghostly human form. There’s an implicit nod, I think, to the naive purity of high Modernism – you can’t look at a stack of repeating forms (nor make one) without thinking of Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column. But Belmore fastens it to the cold, hard ground: Shopping carts, she told me, are essential tools for the homeless, whose population has exploded amid skyrocketing housing costs during her time in Vancouver; and tarps are maybe their most important means of survival.